You Exist Too Much is Palestinian-American writer Zaina Arafat’s debut novel, published in 2020. In 2021, the novel won the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. The novel follows the life of its unnamed narrator, navigating her identity as a bi Palestinian-American woman in her twenties, experiencing different relationships, love addiction, eating disorders, and mental health struggles, and all the while not being accepted by her mother for being bi.
The novel is a tender, heartfelt, and genuine portrayal of what it feels like to never fit in, both culturally and in terms of sexuality. The protagonist and narrator, who is deliberately unnamed, explores what it means to exist between binaries: Middle Eastern and American, straight and gay, woman and man. She is caught between her cultural, religious, and sexual identities; through her experiences, she longs for both love and “a place to call home”. Throughout the novel, the narrator always feels like she doesn’t fit in with her Arab cousins’ culture, but also doesn’t completely fit in with Americans either.
The narrator delves into her deepest desires; during her teenage years, she had kept her longings a secret, and in her twenties, they transpire into romances and obsessions with other people, or, as it’s called in her therapy sessions, “love addiction”.
I agree with Roxane Gay that the novel is “deeply compelling [and] sexy”. It’s written so well, it’s one of those books that I have read and will remember for years, or even for life. Arafat’s prose is so real and so human that I felt as if I knew the narrator like a close friend. At the start of the novel, the quote from Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, “Pleasure disappoints, possibility never”, is particularly well placed. It is from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, the philosopher’s first published work, concerned with two modes of human existence: a hedonistic, aesthetic way of living and an ethical way of living based on commitment. In either way, one can go too far and lose one’s sense of self. This made me think about how, as bi people, we are often asked which we would “choose” between “two”, as if it must be either heterosexuality or homosexuality and not both.
Furthermore, the way in which the narrator of You Exist Too Much must balance her own desires and sense of self with how her culture and her mother would like her to be is a poignant and stark reflection of how we are made to feel like we must choose between aspects of ourselves instead of being accepted as a whole. I think this novel will strongly resonate with bi readers. I also feel that non-bi readers would greatly empathise with the narrator.
From the very beginning, the narrator details vivid childhood memories of being told what is “haram” (Arabic for “religiously forbidden” or “taboo”), and from a young age she thinks deeply about not only her sexuality but also her gender. When she has to swap her shorts with her uncle’s trousers for religious modesty expectations and is then questioned whether she’s a boy or a girl, she wonders: “why, as a man, his bare legs were somehow less troubling than mine. It was a double standard. […] In acquiring my gender, I had become offensive. But as I stood in front of him, an unexpected pride began to swell inside me. I liked the way his trousers made me feel. I felt, for once, seen. Like I could get attention from boys, from girls.”
Not only is the narrator not offended by being asked whether she’s a boy or a girl when wearing her uncle’s trousers, she notes how she “enjoyed occupying blurred lines. Ambiguity was an unsettling yet exhilarating space.” This struck a chord with me; our potential as bi people to turn the ambiguous into something not confusing nor undecided, but into something deliberately line-blurring and deliberately beyond any binary. I think that is rather empowering and uplifting. Just because the outside world doesn’t understand us completely, and just because others can’t put us into neat boxes of heterosexuality and homosexuality, doesn’t mean that we can’t exist in that space between, not uncomfortably but with unlimited potential for pride and self-acceptance.
The narrator navigates all of this in often difficult circumstances; she reveals that when she first told her mother on the phone that she likes “both”, her mother had asked, “Is it official?”. The narrator continues: “I was unsure of what ‘official’ meant, in the context of sexuality. I imagined it to mean ‘are you sure’ or ‘is there no way you could just not be that way?’”
She therefore tells her mother that her partner is “Andrew” when she’s actually Anna. But then, when her mother comes to meet the narrator and Anna and eventually finds out that they’re girlfriends, she reacts in an utterly horrible way.
Later, when Anna finds the narrator’s laptop with the password saved, she reads through the emails and finds proof that throughout the four years they’d been together, the narrator “had actively longed for others,” including a “married pregnant straight woman.” This shows the complexity of bi people just like any others: we’re not one-dimensional, and we’re only human.
What I loved was the actual (and frequent) mention of the word “bisexual” (which many other novels often fail to mention by name). Like when she tells her therapy group about how she once “slept with someone, then outed her while keeping [herself] in the closet,” her roommate at the therapy group says, “I just think you should’ve told me that you’re a homosexual,” to which the narrator responds: “Bisexual, I corrected.” The roommate, Molly, says she would have liked the option of switching roommates, to which another therapy group member, Greg, says that nobody is under any obligation to announce their sexuality, and continues: “What do you want her to do, get a tattoo, wear a sign?”
This moment felt especially real, something I, and many other bi people, have experienced. First, there’s the assumption that if we mention a same-sex partner, we must be gay. Then comes the flip side: people of the same gender assuming that because we’re bisexual, we must be interested in them or planning to make a move.
I’ve experienced my straight female friends (some who have even known me since we were four years old) act strange around me after my coming out, when they’d be the last person in the world I would ever see in that way. So, I really related to this moment, and I loved Greg’s response.
A bonus is that there is even a mention of male bisexuality in the novel. In her therapy group, the narrator mentions that one of the participants, Alex, “had slept with a man while his wife was away at rehab”. The acknowledgement of male bisexuality was definitely a bonus.
The narrator often poignantly discusses intolerance of LGBT people in her culture. She describes how, at her cousin’s wedding, her cousins mock one of the bridesmaids for assuming that she’s lesbian. The narrator says she “felt guilty laughing along” but was afraid that if she didn’t, “they would see through to [her] secret,” and eventually, the narrator dances with a guy at the wedding, almost goes into his hotel room with him, but then changes her mind at his door because she sees the bridesmaid (the one bullied for being queer), goes into her room instead, sleeps with her instead of with the guy, sneaks out of her room the next morning, and lies to her cousin that the queer woman “came onto her” and invited her to her room, but that she refused, saying that she likes men. This part was an especially honest portrayal of how internalised biphobia and homophobia can lead us to hiding aspects of ourselves (often at the cost of others — in this case, she outed the bridesmaid but not herself) in order to fit into biphobic and homophobic communities.
There are other very moving truths throughout the novel that bi readers will no doubt relate to. At one point, she remembers how, when her boyfriend in high school cheated on her with the prettiest girl, the narrator “was jealous of him, not her”; elsewhere, she fantasises about the thought that a man could make her feel “emotionally fulfilled […] rather than just sexually satisfied.” This shows the complexity of each person’s bisexuality — some attractions are more sexual than romantic, or vice versa, and, most importantly, all are valid.
In fact, when the narrator’s new boyfriend asks if she has “dated women other than Anna,” the narrator’s response is very relatable to many bi women, in my opinion:
“‘Is that okay?’ I ask, worried that I’ve revealed too much. Surprisingly, it often isn’t, at least not for men. At first, it’s a turn-on; they ask many questions — have you ever done this, would you ever try that, would I be allowed to watch sometime, and could we ever do a threesome? Then it becomes a problem, as everyone starts to seem like a threat to him, both men and women. Soon, insecurity consumes the relationship and it crumbles around me.”
He replies: “You know […] sometimes I wish I were bisexual. But unfortunately, I just like women.” And the narrator smiles, because it’s “exactly the right thing to say”; I agree wholeheartedly with this passage. I have had similar experiences with straight men I’ve dated; they treat female bisexuality like a fetish or something existing purely for the male gaze, and only one man I dated responded that he wished he were bi too — others were robustly proud of being straight, as if it were better than being bi.
Later in the novel, when the narrator talks with her soon-to-be girlfriend Tara, she tells Tara about her previous relationships with men and women, and Tara says, “I wouldn’t have guessed you were bi,” to which the narrator shrugs and says, “Isn’t everyone, these days?”
To be honest, I don’t share this sentiment — saying that everyone is bi is as harmful and untrue as saying that nobody is bi. But this was the only part I personally disagreed with, and otherwise, I loved the whole novel.
As an adult, the narrator is again challenged about her clothes in Israeli-Palestinian settings, just as she had been as a child. This time, the Israeli soldier, a woman, looks at her clothes and asks, “Why do you carry men’s shoes? […] You are lesbian?” to which the narrator replies that they’re “not men’s shoes […] they’re [hers].”
This reminds me of when the British comedian Suzy Eddie Izzard famously said, “They’re not women’s clothes, they’re my clothes. I bought them,” reminding everyone that clothing has no inherent gender and is a form of personal expression, not a rulebook to be followed. It illuminates the unity between bi and trans communities. Both of us challenge binaries in a compulsory heterosexual, cisgender, and monosexual world.
Many parts of the novel will make bi readers feel genuinely sad about biphobic experiences they have no doubt lived through themselves. For example, towards the end of the novel, the narrator tells her mother about her new girlfriend, and her mother becomes angry again and rants:
“‘Shut up!’ she shouts. ‘[…] I would feel sorry for you if you were really a gay […] I’d feel sorry for myself, most of all. But you just want to play games with people. Why did you cry about that guy from Argentina? You were either lying then, or you’re lying now.’”
The narrator replies that she “wasn’t playing games” because she “loved him, too”; this was a poignant reminder of the distressing biphobia we face, being accused of being “gay, straight, or lying” and having our relationships with people of various genders dismissed or not believed to be truthful because of biphobic assumptions on the part of non-bi people.
All in all, I loved this book, and as bi people, we can learn a lot from it. The assertion that the unnamed narrator “exists too much” is countered so beautifully by her decision to take up space and exist on her own terms, in between cultures and sexualities. We, too, should take up more space and be who we truly are.